Best time to send an email… but it could get your co-workers in trouble: Up to 94% of messages sent between 3 and 6 p.m. on SUNDAY were opened, study shows

The best day and time to send an email has been revealed in new data, although following this advice could lead to fewer friends in the office.

A study by Axios HQ found that colleagues are most likely to read and act on an email sent on Sunday between 3 and 6 pm – with an impressive 94 percent open rate.

The researchers analyzed 8.7 million internal emails between January 2022 and March 2023, from companies with fewer than 50 employees to large international corporations.

If employees are willing to take the risk of sending important emails on a Sunday afternoon, these are the most read emails because they are at the top of the inboxes of colleagues who arrive on Monday morning.

But experts have warned this could be another sign of a “techno invasion,” with work increasingly encroaching on employees’ personal lives.

Axios HQ looked at the best overall shipping day and shipping time, before combining the data to discover the key window from 3pm to 6pm.

The second most effective time for internal email on Sunday is 6 to 9 p.m., researchers said, when emails have an 86 percent open rate.

But employees shouldn’t assume the weekend is the time to send all the important emails: The worst internal email open rate occurs on Saturday mornings, data shows.

During the actual work week, Friday night is the worst time to send emails, while Tuesday and Thursday between 3am and 6am both have an impressive 75 percent open rate.

Even if emails are scheduled at these times, they can still harm mental health and work-life balance, experts say.

Dr. Matthew Davis, an associate professor at Leeds University Business School, told The Times: ‘There is a phenomenon known as ‘techno invasion’. And that’s a sense of the work technology creeping into your personal life as well.

“And we know that this is linked to people feeling more stressed, less satisfied with their jobs and their work-life balance.

“My concern would be if people see this and think, ‘I’ll start sending these out a bit more routinely over the weekend.’

“Because for some people it’s fine … but there’s a large portion of people that will add to that feeling of burden.”

Previous research has found that only 9 per cent of UK workers are ‘engaged’ in their work, ranking the country 33rd out of 38 countries

There is also the risk that an email will be opened but then ignored or not read due to employee stress levels or annoyance with the timing of the message.

The researchers admitted that “sending windows is not always the same as reading windows” – and the percentage of employees who opened the email doesn’t reflect whether it was read or answered properly.

Previous research has shown that only 9 per cent of UK workers are ‘engaged’ in their work, placing the country 33rd out of 38 countries.

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, a total of 41 percent suffer daily stress, with 15 percent experiencing workplace anger and 20 percent feeling sad.

Employment experts believe that after the lockdowns, employees now value a good work-life balance more.

So there is a greater risk that sending emails on weekends is not as effective as it seems.

MailOnline reported earlier this year that hundreds of UK companies are advertising early termination on Friday to hire workers who are now more aware of their own work-life balance in the wake of the pandemic.